


The Sniper

by Clementive



Series: Battlefield Series [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Tenten (Naruto), Battlefield, Cynicism, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Mild Blood, Military, Suicidal Thoughts, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21578833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementive/pseuds/Clementive
Summary: Neji Hyuuga was one more criminal enrolled in a never ending war and sent to the front to die. Tenten wouldn't let him.
Relationships: Hyuuga Neji/Tenten
Series: Battlefield Series [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1545790
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	The Sniper

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this back in 2015 on FF.net. I fixed it in terms of grammar and typos and weird sentences.
> 
> Hope you enjoy! :D

The world was snow-white, but it sparkled red, tilted, drunk on darkness.

His world became the front, or the front became his whole world, Neji Hyuuga didn't know which way it was anymore. It seemed straight at times, lines of soldiers, lines of ants, but days and nights it was filled with spikes of shadows, tilted toward graves, rough rounded edges of worn hearts.

So Neji read and he thought if he ignored the shadow long enough, it would fade away, rolling away like the bluish smoke it carried. Red cigarette buds and bombs; they would fade away like everything else. Countries, houses, freedom. He could strike them one by one like he did on the wall on his prison cell, before the war, but on the front, time was frozen. There was no counting the days, the meals, the privileges gained or lost.

On the front, it was all about ignoring shadows, filling them with words because they only gave him one bullet when they gave him his uniform.

"Teacher, don't be troublesome and look at me."

Neji slowly raised his head from his book and blinked. In his head, the darkness had withered. Trapped in the pages of his book, the world still stumbled from season to season, from the most vivid green to scorched brown to pristine white. One more lie or his death.

"Captain," Neji nodded stiffly, debating like always whether he should greet him properly or not.

He had said sir too often when he still believed in authority and making as little ripples as possible in his uncle's manor. His hand moved half-heartedly to his forehead. He didn't even bother anymore. His uncle was dead. His manor was probably destroyed, scorched. Maybe, it never mattered.

"I've never seen you touch your gun." Shikamaru began slowly, drawling on his smoke while he watched clouds. Neji noticed again that he always seemed to speak as if caught in the middle of a yawn. "Are you going to try to convince me you're just new and jumpy or shitting yourself thinking about shooting someone?"

"No."

Neji closed his book, leaning farther onto the tree and his gaze didn't falter. The muscles of his jaw worked. Shikamaru ran another hand in his hair, kicking at the frozen ground.

"I'm Captain, so I must do what is best for my men. I can't let you cover one of my men if you're one of _them._ You're a liability and I can't have that."

"I understand."

Shikamaru let his hand fall on his gun, his dark eyes darting downward between his book and his face. The captain was lazy, but they said he was nothing but fair. Neji didn't care as men sentenced to death rarely did.

"What did you do to be sent here?" Shikamaru asked stiffly, locking his jaw, and his face was made of twisted shadows. "I need to know if I need to shoot you right now or ask the women on my platoon if they want to castrate you first."

"I tried to rob a bank," Neji said coldly, opening his book back to where he had stopped. His slim finger blocked the first dialogue line and he gave a half-hearted shrug for good measure. "I'm just a petty criminal, captain, I doubt any woman would find it enthralling to castrate me over a million dollars I didn't touch."

"Good. Alright..." His muscles relaxed and Shikamary let go of his gun. "This was less troublesome than I thought it would be."

"Hn."

He waited until he didn't hear the squeak on his boots onto the snow and smell tobacco before moving his finger from the words: " _I tried to rob a bank_ ".

On good days, each soldier killed about ten soldiers and on bad days, they died before they could fire.

One more or one less murderer on the front wouldn't change that.

So Neji read.

* * *

Tenten Morino made an angel on the snow, her muscles cringing, snapping loudly out of the jagged cold. Snapping her back into place. _Soon_ , she promised herself.

She faced the sky, while the first company faced another line of soldiers.

She thought ashes licked the sky when soldiers raised their guns and they rumbled across it like shooting stars when they fired. The sky was nothing but ablaze curtains then, violent and raw, of a scenery that was too small for all the souls. Orange and red sky, and it boiled and shifted against the wind. The natural flow of the world was long gone. It was only made of lines and angles, now: lines of soldiers and shooting angles. The line that shot. The line that fell. A few more hours and they would give her a new list. A few more hours and she would join the fight.

And the sky would be about her.

A sky of raining bullets, their copper snapping like lightning, blood spilling like dawn and dusk.

Tenten hummed, stretching her arms above her head, her eyes flickering with the faraway bombs and the paths they traced above. Above. Higher the uneven horizon. Sky. Heaven. She only stared at the ground when she fired.

She wondered if that was why her mother named her Tenten; after the sky. After heaven. After the colours war splattered on the sky when she was born.

Below, on the ground, her boots caked with frost mud and frozen guts and blood, her eyes were plain, her chest thinned by the watered food. Her name only meant ten on ten.

Ten deaths. Ten bullets. No survivor.

Her finger curled around the trigger of her gun, teasing the resistance. The headquarters had sent a new messenger today. He would cross the field and come back, carrying nothing but lists of locations and soldiers and then it would be her turn. Her eye on her gunsights, her humming reduced to tensed silence, dark excitement pulsing in her ears. A taunting whisper before the loud ripping of blood and bones.

One bullet per name on the list.

Tenten never missed.

"Oi!" someone nudged her foot. "Wanna bet on how long the new messenger will last?"

Tenten smiled tearing her eyes off the sky to face a soldier holding up a slim notepad. He kept writing, without looking up, his movements jerking with the rising wind. The red tattoos on his cheeks glowed almost bluish from the cold. She forgot his name. They were so many of them, so many nicknames to learn and then, forget when they died. Names weren't as tangible as they used to be. A bed was wherever they could sleep. Men. Men were dead. They were just soldiers now.

After the first year, the whole company stopped bothering with names. Because they were all dead soldiers walking. Because there still were inspections that required polishing their boots off the blood of the friends who had died next to them the previous day. It made everything easier when they pretended they were just soldiers and words didn't matter as much as they used to and the bucket of reddened water at their feet weren't the remains of someone they had known. They even pretended to forget their meaning; men, women... they lived in another era.

On the front, words carried little power and beasts did not think or speak.

"How is he?" Tenten whispered and her finger stiffened around the trigger.

She shot the last messenger in the head before the bomb sucked him in towards the sky and peeled him apart, limbs by limbs. His scorched fingers were curled up towards the sky, his wedding band gleaming through the black powder when it thudded onto the ground. They had rationed her bullets after that.

Death was death; without mercy, without delay.

"It's a she, actually. Your old man going nuts with the war and all?" He spat on the floor, shifting from one foot to the other.

"Inuzuka..." another soldier growled, but he narrowed his eyes at her.

"Hello there, captain!" she said breezily, but her gun didn't shake. Despite the cold, despite his icy eyes and the stars on his uniform, she still pointed it at Kiba Inuzuka.

"Christ! Fine! Lower that gun! Your father isn't nuts but he still sent us a questionable messenger!" He shoved his trembling hands and notepad in his pockets. He shifted faster, white smoke rolling out of his mouth. She didn't lower her gun. "The girl looks like a freaking angel," he continued desperately, his wild eyes flickering between the point of her gun and the captain. "As if an angel can save us, at this point. Right? So wanna bet?"

"No. Not all." She smiled brighter. "And call my father crazy one more time and I'll shoot you like the dog you are, Inuzuka."

She brushed herself up, pulling her gun back towards her. She shook the stiffness off her limbs. She heard Inuzuka curse under his breath as he turned away. Captain Nara hesitated, opened his mouth, then clenched his jaw back onto his cigarette.

"Don't be troublesome. Your bullets are already rationed, Tenten. "

"Just don't tell him that, Captain, and it won't be as troublesome for you."

She looked down at the ground, in the middle of her shrug.

The hardened snow showed no sign of an angel.

Ten on Ten. No survivor. Just the way she liked it.

* * *

Neji Hyuuga silently slid in the hole behind the sniper.

The sole of boots cringed onto the hardened snow and he stilled, watching her shoulders tense. They rolled back, her riffle pressed against her right one. Unlike the rest of the platoon, she wore nothing but black, her dark hair pulled to the side. The bombs streaked her in shades that contrasted and twisted. Dull and vivid colours interlaced on her skin, and she almost seemed alive, moving and drifting. The sounds of the bombs pounding against his skull, the roaring of the planes never too far behind. His ears hissed and he clenched his teeth. There was a dead man's skin and blood under his nails.

There always was, but somehow it made it worse now that he stood close to her.

The other men whispered there was a dead zone around her because her father was Major Ibiki Morino, the head of the interrogation squad. Yet, Neji noticed only the way she laughed harder and louder than anyone while her eyes remained as hard as the ground beneath the snow. Dull brown but hardened in spikes. Dull and deadly.

Neji had watched her polish her gun, a bullet resting against her tongue while she smiled. Before she loaded her sniper riffle, she always smiled and everyone on the platoon tiptoed around her. Never quite brushing by or hurrying past her. Everyone around her died too quickly and there was nothing to hope for on the front but to die quickly. So, they paused and lingered on bad days, their clothes caked in their friends' blood, the memories snaking up and down their arms in endless shudders.

Neji hoped she never noticed how he did it more often than anyone else. A quick death. An execution that he would at least know the date of. Freedom. Freedom from the angel of death.

He had lived too long with death and hope tangled too tightly together to not approach her. But her delicate bone structure didn't match the shift of her hands around her gun. The curve of her mouth didn't match the roughness of her words and he hated the conflict of her two natures, how he wasn't sure if she wanted to heal or kill. How one day, her weapon was about a painless death and the next about spreading someone's brains onto the snow because she was bored and growing restless.

Fate, he decided. It was fate that drew him to the beast before the woman.

It was fate that kept him guarded and away from her, until then. He was going to die today.

"Are you a newbie or did you lose a bet to be stuck here with me?" Tenten didn't bother glancing back at him. Her hand played with the trigger and he sheltered his head with his arms. The blast had been closer this time.

His ears rang painfully and his other senses swam.

Neji pushed the soil and snow out of his eyes but his hands came out red and warm. Too warm. He quickly wiped his hands. Shifting. Warming up. He pretended blood didn't do as much. He pretended he wasn't wearing another man's skin on his cheek, under his nails or on his uniform. There were too many cloaks of human flesh on him and it wasn't even midday.

"I lost a bet," Neji said flatly, reaching for his own weapon. The dead zone was supposed to be ten feet, but while stuck in this hole with her, there wasn't even a foot between them. She shone, hard and sparkling, a diamond, but her words were careless, tossed over her shoulder while she went through the messenger's list.

Her shoulder kicked back and already her finger reached next to her to turn a page. He glanced at the face drawn on the page, his jaw muscle working. _Just shoot me_ , he almost shouted. _Turn around and shoot me!_

"About the messenger?"

He blinked slowly, trying to remember why they would talk about the messenger. The world was too loud and he wanted to slide down onto the ground and read. But there was the blood and snow and the cold and his uniform was soaking and he was shivering...

"Normally, people don't ignore me when I'm handling this little baby," she chuckled, but her voice cut through him. Too cheerful. Too cold. He wiped his hands on his pants again, spreading the blood wider. "So what was the bet about?"

"The messenger," he said slowly, numbness beating in his veins. "I bet she wouldn't last a week." Neji flexed his hands, telling himself it was the cold that made them quiver and glow raw and pink.

He cleared his throat, risking a glance over the hole. Inuzuka smirked at him and the messenger glared at him, her vibrant blue eyes narrowed into slits. The Fox drew a line on his throat, exaggeratedly rolling his eyes, and the captain kept smoking, his gaze unwavering.

Neji still didn't understand how they hunched close, passing a cigarette back and forth, trapped under raining bombs and they didn't shoot. It was like they didn't care; here or there, they could die and they didn't care. He had nothing to live for, but he cared. His knuckles were always white around his gun. No matter how much he thought it would be easier to die, he cared too much to unclench his jaw and join them. Pretend to be what they say he was: a teacher.

Even if the captain didn't tell them about Neji and fate and the only bullet the headquarters allowed him to keep, he knew they would smell it off his skin eventually. He didn't belong. The idea of being with others was awkward to him, so he bet. And he lost. And now he was in a hole with a sniper that has long forgotten the difference between life and death and she wouldn't turn around and shoot him.

Neji had been sent to the front to die and he didn't like anyone reminding that the line between life and death was too thin to mean anything. Whenever he closed his eyes now, the dead haunted him and the living escaped him.

"You're the Teacher? I heard you correct everyone's grammar on the platoon. The... The Fox? Whatever. The blond guy keeps ranting about it with Inu... Inu-something. The one who always lists the bets? Damn!" Tenten crooned while titling her head and moving her rifle to the side. "Stop moving, little one."

His tongue thickened in his mouth. How could she be so calm?

"Inuzuka, and yes, they call me the Teacher."

She stilled and fired. Neji hid the tremors of his hands by shoving them in his pocket. His gun nudged his ribcage and he thought again about the only bullet he had. The thought came each time more forceful each day. His finger on the trigger, the barrel in his mouth.

"So... how does a teacher explain war? "

His head snapped back towards her, there was something else laced in her humourless laugh for once. The nape of her neck gleamed with prickles of icy sweat. He still hesitated between savage and vulnerable to describe her, the roll of her shoulders, another name scratched off her list.

"We don't," he snapped icily.

"Because we're too young?"

There were four empty cartridges between them, half-buried in the snow, and four bodies in front of her.

"Don't mock me."

" _War and Peace_ ," she muttered, half-humming, half-laughing to herself and he cringed at the sound it made in her chest. Her voice tumbled out of her broken but polished. "That was the name of a book, right, Teacher? If you're lucky enough you won't ever have to explain it to students. A shame that would be to lie through your teeth, right?"

He laughed humourlessly. They hadn't sent him to the front with only one bullet to use on another soldier. Enemy or not.

He was lying every day. To himself. To the rest of the platoon.

It would end here for him.

* * *

Neji didn't think he would survive the first round.

Every three weeks, they rotated the soldiers between the first line and the last one. They sent them back miles from the front where they could sleep in dorms and shower. The shower, the bed seemed unreal. The hot water didn't wash away the tremors of his body, the layers of flesh and blood he wished he could scrub off his skin. They soaked his bones, inhabited his nightmares.

Another part of him was dead.

Neji still held the damp towel across his shoulder when he saw Tenten near his bunk. His muscles quivered and then, froze, but his hands were never still now. She read one of his books, curled against the wall, one hand keeping the book from closing on her knees and the other holding a gun. Neji thought she was dead at first, hunched over the book, silent and stiff and unmoving. He thought of bombs that left shells and carcasses before spitting out smoking organs and limbs. Spitting out smoke instead of fire.

Then, she turned the page and he thought of the ones he had ripped out once, when there was nothing but anger.

"This is my bunk and this book is definitely not yours," he said coldly. "Leave. _Now_."

"Sshhh."

Tenten waved the gun carelessly, her shoulders slumping forward in a stiff haltered motion. He paled, thinking of the name she must have read on the first page of the book, of his father's neat writing in the margins.

"Get out," Neji ordered darkly, but his throat burned and he dropped the towel on his bunk, frustrated and helpless. "This is the men's quarters. You've no business being here."

He had only one bullet and his father's name. He would willingly give her neither. He heard the sudden spring, almost soft and dormant and her finger left the safety of her handgun. She was fluid again. Crashing and rolling. His ragged breath turned into shortened pants.

Her arm lifted to aim at his head.

"If you keep interrupting me before I reach the end of the chapter, I'll shoot you. I stole that bullet so there's no bullet ration stopping me."

"From my gun," Neji muttered bleakly. "You took it from my gun."

His heart hammered, deafening and violent. Dazed, he sat down on his bunk, running his hands over his face, in his hair. Again and again. He was in the dead zone, merely four feet away from her. He had no more bullet and he couldn't ask for a new one. There was no such thing as second chances.

"That's right, now shut up." Tenten nodded and hummed and his gaze flickered from the wall to the ceiling, to her. To her and her gun.

Neji forgot how long he sat there, thinking he was already dead. Tenten refused to move. She didn't shift her eyes from the book. She kept turning the pages, holding the gun. She sighed and deflated sometimes. Whenever she did, she would mouth the words, her finger playing with the safety of her gun. When she frowned, she would lowered her gun and let the barrel graze the floor.

In the middle of the night, she rose, her gait disoriented when she handed him back the book. Her gaze didn't seem as harden, but it wasn't haunted either. She seemed startled and ten years younger.

"Thank you," she said.

Neji nodded stiffly, running his hand on the worn cover. Tenten hesitated before setting down his bullet on cover of the book. Immediately, his fingers wrapped around it. Relief and fear rushed back in his veins and his heart thawed.

"Don't ever come back."

Tenten laughed quietly, brushing her fingertips against the book. Her eyes sparkled in the dancing moonlight and for the first time, she didn't seem trap between two states, two opposites. Sky and earth. War and peace.

"But who else could teach me about war and peace, Teacher?"

* * *

Neji lay in the darkness while Tenten sat against the wall, her knees up against her chest where she balanced his book.

"It wasn't me."

The pages rustled. They had five days left before returning to the front. With each time he found her at his bunk, she grew louder, not as careful with the bursting reactions she had about everything she read.

"What wasn't you?" Tenten crossed her ankles and raised her head to look at him, still nibbling at her thumb, but he kept staring at the ceiling.

"The teacher. It wasn't me."

He pretended he was speaking to the darkness. It used to make everything easier when he was in prison. Counting aloud. Laughing aloud. Speaking aloud.

"Ah."

Neji heard her shift and he startled when he felt her fingers around his wrist. Immediately, he snatched his hand away, breathing hard, disoriented. Tenten remained unfazed. In the darkness, there was a softness to the curve of mouth, a silvery glint to her eyes.

"So I guess you're not Hizashi?"

"No."

"You stole his books?"

"No."

"Did you kill him?"

"No!" Neji sat up, cold anger stilling his features. He glared at her, tasting blood in his mouth.

"He was my father."

Her face was a few inches from his. She didn't flinch, cocking her head on the side before pressing the book onto his laps. She was too close. If he touched her then, he feared he would rob her off of the last amount of humanity she had left. If he kept talking, he feared he would give her the last of his.

So he steeled himself. Expressionless, emotionless, he counted the seconds until she left. He counted and recounted the inches that would make the difference between losing himself and paying for his sins.

Fate.

He gave her up to fate.

* * *

Neji saw her father hold her and the same old anger rushed back inside him. The next day they would go back to the front and her father grinned savagely pressing her against his chest while a smaller woman smoothed down her hair. Scars carved both her parents and he wondered why Tenten didn't teach him about family. What made him the one with words, his father's favourite metaphors, and her, the one with the living themes and a still alive family?

He felt betrayed because it was daylight and she belonged somewhere, with people who loved her as much as she loved them. She didn't need his books or him. She didn't need anything as much as he needed the brushes of pages and his father's thin handwriting or his only bullet.

She already had everything while he had nothing except the same anger that made him once pressed the trigger.

When night fell and she tiptoed around his bunk, he lay facing the wall in stubborn silence. She searched for his books, cursing quietly when she couldn't find them. He refused to turn and acknowledge her. Then, her small hands were on his back and he choked on his breath when it became her whole body pressed against his back. He waited for the gun. He waited for the kill.

"You're a selfish bastard," she growled against his neck. Her lips grazing his skin sent shivers down his spine and he had never been this terrified since his parents died.

Yet, Neji turned to face her, the thin bed screeching. He pulled her closer, hunger matching hunger. His fingers sank in her dark locks, holding her against him as he kissed her, tongue rolling, sucking, teeth sinking.

Until they were skin against skin.

Until the only thing holding them together was the fear of never touching anyone again.

* * *

"My uncle took me in after my father died and I made his life a living hell. I blamed him. I blamed my cousins... There were so many people to blame... Tenten," Neji said her name like a statement, a warning, and he let it wander between them, so that she could turn away if she wanted to. Ten seconds. Ten inches.

The bombs never stopped, and she never moved.

"It's my real name," Tenten whispered against his ear.

He turned towards her, searching her eyes. Every time she was too close, he forgot to hesitate.

"I was imprisoned," he whispered against her lips. "I shot my uncle in the head."

* * *

Tenten avoided him for days, so Neji read, his lips tightly pressed together.

He was afraid they would whisper her name if they moved; if he read aloud, every word would sound like the bristle sound of her uniform slipping away from him. The screech of the bed as she left without glancing back.

Then, Tenten ambushed him when he tried to shave, the icy water dripping down his chin, his lips bloodied from his chattering teeth. His thumb ran on the edge of the blade he was using. In the twilight, her eyes shone like silver, her mouth twisted in frustration. He let her pace, deflating during some steps while stiffening during others. At peace, at war.

"Why?" Tenten asked simply and she tossed the word like she didn't want to know, like she couldn't bear it and they were both closing their hands around a naked blade, instead of holding it to each other's throat.

Neji pressed the towel to his numb cheeks glancing up at her. His knife slid back into the soapy water.

"Why are we at war, Tenten?"

She stiffened again, glancing at the dripping blood on the snow rather than his eyes. A touch of red, a touch of death.

"I forgot."

Neji nodded slowly.

"I forgot too."

Tenten laughed carelessly, but not quite free, and it wasn't only the silence between them that was broken. It was the whole world that was wrecked, hanging onto slivers of ruins and a vicious circle that dragged them in an infernal, unstoppable rhythm.

What was up? The sky fell each day with raining bombs, streaked with planes that fell more often than they flew.

What was down? Bullets, silver and copper, tied her down. For every life she had taken, there were too many scars to mention.

But just enough to lie and say she had forgotten.

What was left of her?

War had plucked out her wings.

Her shoulders still shaking, Tenten lay down on the hardened ground and tried to make an angel in the snow.

"My name is Neji," he said and held out his hand.

* * *

It was one drop, as small as a tear, but Tenten thought the earth ripped open beneath her feet. It was another drop, pink, diluted by the heavy snow, and she thought a bomb had found them and tore them apart. Then forced them back together, bones and flesh amiss.

Just the core.

Barely hanging.

One bullet and his blood on her hands.

"Do you think there's a difference between my kind of murder and yours?" Tenten rushed between states, jumping from word to word, her tongue heavy in her mouth, while her hands slipped in his blood. "Because I keep asking myself... Making lists... Thinking and thinking about you," she bit her lip, pulling at his uniform.

Neji was numb from the snow.

He was numb from the blood loss.

And he had never found her more beautiful; her breath wavering, her eyes flickering and welling up and hardening again.

"And each time I ask myself: who's the biggest monster?"

"I don't think we are monsters," he rasped, thinking of his cousins visiting him in prison, silent in their own ways but never angry and cold like his uncle, their father, had hoped them to be. He thought he was freeing himself when he pressed the trigger, but they thought he did it for them. He never corrected them, imprisoned and caged once more.

His hands circled her wrists and he closed his eyes and started to drift.

"What are we then?" Tenten shook him, furious and demanding, like the time she asked him about a specific passage that his father had annotated.

Like when Shikamaru said he couldn't request a medic for Neji. Criminals die on the front.

Neji thought of her in glimpses of hope and words that could never fill her enough. He almost resumed their argument of last night, now that the sky had fallen and that his gun was still full and that he was still dying. She said the saddest word was hope. He thought the saddest one was "could".

He _could_ have loved her.

He _could_ have survived.

"I don't know," Neji said instead. He used to be certain of such things; right and wrong. Life and death. But the world had started to pale and there was only her and no silence. No peace. No place for the saddest word when she was crying. "I think we're just trying to escape our fate, Tenten. Whatever it takes."

The way she laughed drew goosebumps on his necks, and only when he did look up at her did he realize why that was. She wasn't laughing. She was screaming and there was no escape. A single bullet rest on her tongue and her bloodied hand pulled it apart.

"Neji, Neji," she repeated his name, her mouth reddened by the number of times she had pressed them against his. Her teeth flashed, white, her lips now blackened by the bullet coming apart and revealing the powder inside it. "It's going to sting like a bitch."

Then, she ignited the black powder on his gaping wound, sealing it shut.

She _could_ have given up on him.

* * *

"Did you notice how words stopped meaning anything here?" Tenten whispered against his neck, her hands moving across his skin, tracing his burned scars with calloused fingers. "We are talking right now, but it means nothing because a bomb could fall and we could be blown to pieces, just like that." she snapped her fingers against his skin and he shivered looking down at her. "We would be dead and everything we've said until this point would mean nothing."

"Everything always means something."

Tenten bit her lips, turning away from his heat. Neji let her roll off, but his fingers still played with the loose strands of her hair and it was like they weren't apart.

Had she crave his weight on her, the sensation of his muscles rolling under her fingers, fear wouldn't twist her gut and gnaw at her bones. But she craved the way he looked at her and whispered her name before reaching for her. His eyes were the moon and beyond and that didn't make her human. It made her vulnerable.

"You don't think so?" he asked quietly, half-asleep.

"No, I don't," Tenten muttered, waiting, dreading the moment he would stop his movements and asked her if they meant nothing to her. If this– them together– was nothing more than something that happened between war and peace.

But Neji didn't pause, didn't gasp, angry or sullen.

Tenten pressed her lids shut, a silent sob imprisoned in her throat. It was when he was silent, when he grazed rather than touched, that she remembered everything meant something to him because he was sentenced to death even if she had saved him once.

Not because he loved her. Not because he cared for her. Only because every day, he stood a little closer to death.

And had he not have only one bullet in his gun, maybe it would have meant nothing: touching her, tasting her skin and mouth, letting her read and collide against his chest afterward.

After all, death was the only thing that meant something to him.

"The saddest word is _should,_ " Neji muttered, his eyes closed, the corner of his mouth titling up. "You should get some sleep. You should stop pushing me away. You should-"

She clasped her hand on his mouth, his eyes gleaming as he kissed her palm.

"What happened to hope?"

He took her hand off his mouth, kissing her wrist. She stilled. He gave her one of his rare smiles.

"It stung like a bitch."

* * *

At the end, she was fate, a beast and a woman all wrapped in one.

"There's this thing, I heard," Neji gave her one of his rare smiles as he leaned on a tree, his fingers reaching for a single green dangling leaf caught in the breeze. "Armistice, from Medieval Latin. Arms stopping, if I'm not mistaken."

Tenten spun around, her shoulders throbbing with the number of times her rifle had kicked back against it. She didn't smile. All she heard were bodies going limp, numbers filing her reports, names scratched off a list and how all of that had meant nothing. How all of that still scarred her.

Now she was the one jerking, ticking, startling and he was calmer than he ever was since he was sent to the front.

"This is the saddest word, I've ever heard," she said flatly.

Tenten almost spat and she considered walking away from him and whatever they had shared. It was spring and it made everything too raw and uncomfortable. After endless winter, she worried she wouldn't have time to load her weapons, to return to never glancing at the ground. Always up. Always killing.

"Tenten," Neji said quietly and she hated how he could read her mood, her body, and slipped behind her without her reflexes burying her gun in his guts. And she loved him. And she hated the sound of her name in his mouth because she heard the fondness but couldn't quite understand it. And she still didn't know if she loved the sound of his in hers.

"I did my time, so I will be a free man," he pressed his forehead in the crook of her neck. "They even said they'd pay me for my services rendered to my country."

He kissed her cheek.

"If armistice isn't an enchanted word or just a rumour."

She could close her eyes and lean back against his chest, she knew. Give in, cave in, and he would understand and catch her just as every time before this moment. Instead, she laced their fingers, watching the sky cleared. He was a free man and he was still with her, she needed to remember that.

"Tenten..." Neji groaned hungrily against her neck. He nibbled at her skin, the corner of her mouth, her lips, his arms tightening around her. "I need you to have faith in that word." His fingers combed through her hair, her lips glistering when his lips released them.

"Why?"

_Because I need you to have faith in us._

"Who else could teach me about faith, Tenten?"

**Author's Note:**

> My feels are all over the place because it's NejiTen. :)))))
> 
> All kudos/feedback are really appreciated! ^_^


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